They knew. They said nothing, did nothing.

Bonus: Another clue for you about David Johnston's willful cluelessness.

In today’s National Post, Erin O'Toole — the man China wanted to take down, from my lengthy conversation with O’Toole yesterday following the former Conservative leader’s epic speech in the House of Commons.

What Beijing wants in Canada, Beijing gets: The defeat of O’Toole’s Conservatives, and the Trudeau government overruling the House of Commons on a public inquiry, handing the file to Beijing’s trusted friend, David Johnston, instead.

It was an astonishing address to the House: I am rising on a question of privilege concerning efforts and actions by officials and agents of the People's Republic of China to interfere with me. . . . One for the record books. In Hansard, here.

The main attraction in my Post story is O’Toole’s fairly full accounting of the briefing he got from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service last Friday about Beijing’s clandestine campaign to ruin him, to wreck his party’s chances in the 2021 federal election and to re-elect Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. From what I’ve come to know about this stuff, in my view the important bit was about the Canadian operations of Beijing’s United Front Work Department, which I’ve written about at length in this newsletter.

(To be clear: “They knew” is meant to mean the security agencies knew at the very top, and if the Prime Minister’s Office didn’t know it surely ought to have known and by 2021 the PMO’s organizing principle in these matters was it was best, politically, to not know any of the gory details at all.)

“This was a comprehensive and a sophisticated campaign, and we’re only really seeing it now because of the leaks. And it was 100 per cent the United Front,” O’Toole told me.

“One hundred per cent. They (CSIS officials) were very careful to explain the organizational structure linking it directly to Beijing. That’s the foreign interference, and the domestic operations, that’s the United Front. All the other aspects, the tools, methods of suppression, that’s what’s used by United Front agents and activists. And CSIS knows this. It’s clear.”

Here’s why it’s important. Remember what I noticed in the National Post last week under the headline David Johnston escapes inquiry into his own China dealings? How the United Front looms darkly over every aspect of life in Canada’s Chinese diaspora communities and yet it’s mentioned only once, in passing, in “independent special rapporteur” David Johnston’s 53-page report?

Since 2018, Chinese supreme leader Xi Jinping has dramatically ramped up the global operations of the United Front Work Department - its annual budget now eclipses the budget of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs — and notably so in Canada, where, among other things, Beijing has implanted at least four “overseas police stations” to enforce the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign policy mandates in diaspora communities.

There’s more on that in my National Post story. What O’Toole told me that I didn’t report because I’m so darn modest: “None of it is hard to believe for anybody who subscribes to your Substack, or for anyone who has followed this story for the past five or ten years.”

But there was shocking stuff in that CSIS briefing, some of which you can read about in my Post interview. Hint: It’s been more or less three years since CSIS opened a dossier on Beijing’s threats to O’Toole. And he’s just being told about this now?

As Real Story subscribers will know by now, the United Front’s operatives in the GTA and much of Metro Vancouver, by the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, were indistinguishable from the activist and fundraising base of Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Subscribers will also know that the United Front is the Chinese Communist Party’s primary overseas influence-peddling, “elite capture,” espionage, propaganda and intimidation operation.

Well, now you know why Justin Trudeau, David Johnston, Marco Mendicino and all the other Liberal cabinet ministers and MPs would rather openly defy the will of Parliament - as they did again today, losing a 174-150 vote to ditch Johnston and get on with a public inquiry - than submit to any further scrutiny about what the hell’s been going on here.

If anyone here still has doubts, you should read my newsletter tomorrow.

I’ll betray no confidences. Some stuff just had to stay off the record, but what I leave out takes nothing away from the ugly picture. And O’Toole betrayed no confidences either. At one point during the interview, there was this: “That’s as far as I’m going.”

O’Toole had first spoken to a lawyer before discussing the CSIS briefing out loud, and there was this, too: “Because I’m an ex-military guy I never want to be accused of burning someone in uniform . . . they [CSIS] didn’t say lives would be at risk over your sharing this information, but the reason it’s classified is it could dry up sources, put informants at risk, a range of things, because Beijing does try to zero in every time they see where intelligence gets out.”

And that should give you a clue, too, about why Pierre Poilievre has refused the fool’s errand of being taken into David Johnston’s “secret intelligence” confidence about what Johnston claims to know about all this.

Long story short: When it comes to the United Front’s operations in Canada, Johnston doesn’t see anything wrong with it. Neither does Trudeau or Marco Mendicino, and certainly not Senator Yuen Pau Woo.

By way of illustration you might want to swing back to this Real Story newsletter, The Michael Chong Uproar: What’s Changed? Scroll down a bit for this:

Influence, shminfluence. They just don’t see anything wrong with it. It’s just the way the universe should be expected to, like, unfold, man, and the arc of history bends towards China. And if something shocks the public conscience, like the recent revelations about Beijing’s exertions in short-circuiting the 2019 and 2021 federal elections, hey, everybody calm down. The overall election result wasn’t impacted.

As the former Liberal prime minister, current corporate palm-greaser and Beijing bag-carrier Jean Chretien put it: “Ten or 15 constituencies in Canada at most? I don’t think it’s a very big problem.”

Scroll through Johnston’s report and you’ll find a reference to the United Front that doesn’t even mention the United Front or the dozens of Chinese “hometown” associations it’s swallowed up across Canada via the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, now a United Front department, which is run out of China’s Ottawa embassy and China’s consulates.

Ir’s right here: “It is not surprising that these diaspora communities wish to maintain links with their countries of origin. These connections are part of what enriches a multicultural society — they are not foreign interference.”

There it is, right there. There’s nothing wrong with it.

It’s just the new multiculturalism in a new post-national state with no core identity, and national security means whatever we tell you it means, and how very dare you question the integrity of the eminent David Johnston upon whose escutcheon there isn’t so much as the faintest trace of a stain.